


i'm really not the killing type

by John the Alligator (Chyronic)



Series: The Superhero AU [4]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern, Alternate Universe - Superpowers/Superheroes, BUCKLE UP WE’RE GOING PLACES, Brief suicidal ideation, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical Mafia activity, Gen, Implied Self-Harm, Just because people have superpowers doesn't mean they use them for heroics, Scarification, THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE BROTP FEELS BUT THEN I REALIZED IT COULD BE THE PLOT-BEARING FIC, canon-typical war profiteering, child abuse probably, fun fact Jace is canonically a heavy sleeper, fun times in the land of Magic: The Gathering, potential body horror I guess?, tags to be updated as fic progresses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 17:05:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6160551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyronic/pseuds/John%20the%20Alligator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is on the brink of nuclear war, where it's been hovering for decades. The progression into the age of smartphones and social media happens anyway. Jace already finds being the incongruous teenager sitting in at U.N. negotiations awkward; could he at least stop being in the background of memes?</p>
<p>Too bad. It's going to get worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm really not the killing type

**Author's Note:**

> Well. This is happening. We'll be drawing heavily on "Absent Minds" and _Agents of Artifice_ , surprising literally no one but which may be worth keeping in mind for content warnings; if you need details on warnings, please let me know.

Even now, after everything that’s happened to him because of it, Jace is a heavy sleeper. At the rate his life is going it’ll get him killed someday. Today is not that day, though; today it has only gotten him Kallist picking his ankle up and shaking him by it.

“Whmmrfh,” Jace says. He opens his eyes. Yep, that’s Kallist. “Mfffjdt?”

“For the love of God, turn off your alarm,” Kallist says. Jace reads—annoyed, tired, the alarm woke him up fifteen minutes ago and has been going since (oops), under that: yes, they’re still friends. Okay. That’s fine. 

“Mrrrf,” Jace agrees, and kicks at him weakly until Kallist lets go. He drags himself upright and punches buttons until the siren stops going off, then collapses again. “Srrry. Trnf. Srhd.”

“Hey look, that’s almost words!” Kallist says. (Not grinning; still too tired for that; Jace smooths out the headache he’d be getting in a few minutes and hopes that’s a better apology. Impressively enough, he did in fact manage to piece out those noises.) “It speaks!”

“Shhp,” he mumbles. Puts actual effort into it. “Shut up. Words’re hard.”

Kallist sits down on the edge of the bed. Oh, he’s here to needle Jace as long as he had to wake up anyway. So as of now he’s present voluntarily. That’s nice. “Isn’t thinking literally your job?”

“Words are _hard_ ,” Jace says. His mouth and brain appear to be actually communicating with each other again. He pushes his luck and sits up. “Consciousness is hard. This is awful. You are awful.”

He feels Kallist blink instead of rising to the bait. Jace is confused and sweeps for the why. Kallist has had to do this before—multiple times before—it’s why he knows Jace well enough to just give up and start physically shaking him. 

Jace presses his hand on his chin by rote while he thinks. Kallist has seen his scars, at least the ones that can’t be covered by even Jace’s normal amount of clothing. His palm tracks the parallel scars down his throat, the first lines: his name. His family **(Your mother and father loved you)** —the place those tracks of scarring come together at the base of his neck **(and raised you until they knew they couldn’t any longer)**. The words are the ones he has memorized verbatim, the same things he knew when he eventually woke up yesterday. He’s safe. 

Oh. Right. Kallist has never seen him shirtless. “Um,” Jace says. 

“Is there a reason you’re feeling yourself up?” Kallist says dryly. 

Words are hard. He elbows his way into the surface of Kallist’s mind instead. _Dude, look away if you want, I don’t care, but this is important. Just give me a second._

_?_ , Kallist says, and then, **_?!_** , when he realizes that Jace is in his head. 

_Important telepath business,_ Jace says, pushing the idea with a one-two shove of honesty and sarcasm: yes, take him seriously; no, don’t panic. _Can’t talk. Sorry. Let me finish._

Kallist opens his mouth. 

_Kallist I can hear your sex jokes before you say them_ (speech pattern: normal amount of breathlessness) _and I appreciate the commitment to being absolutely terrible_ (tone kick: affectionate insult) _but this really isn’t the time. Please?_ (And hit: pathetic; unintentionally so; because Jace shows weakness often enough that it could never be deliberate.) Jace holds his breath. 

Kallist closes his mouth. 

_Thank you,_ Jace says, a little bit warm but not so much as to be weird. Hopefully. 

Jace retraces the first two scars out of habit. He could read through them in any order he wanted to, but the ritual is important. Across the left collarbone **(You are a great power)** and the ninety-degree angle down **(for you can destroy minds)**. Jace’s hands always tense on that one; by the time he’s repeated the motion **(But you are not a conqueror)** on his right side **(not a ruler)** he’s involuntarily clawing at his skin **( _not careless_ )**. 

That happens every morning. The scar tissue is less sensitive. He barely feels it any more. And his nails aren’t long enough to make himself bleed. 

Alhammarret’s knife work was perfectly symmetrical. Jace’s… less so. He’s still getting used to being lopsided. 

He has to press his palm over the last scar instead of his fingers; it still hurts. 

**(You can trust Lavinia.)**

And he immediately knows who that is. 

“Okay,” Jace says. Kallist lets out a breath neither of them realized he was holding. “Back now.”

“What _was_ that?”

Jace considers honesty. He considers anything other than honesty.

He chooses.

—

Jace is fifteen years old and he’s made a terrible mistake. He’s made a series of terrible mistakes, actually, but it’s the most recent cluster to which he owes the days-old lancing pain in his head and the much more recent careful incisions making their way from his chin to his sternum.

He struggles to suppress a shiver. The first round of blood is drying on his skin, tacky and cold. Alhammarret’s cuts have been measured and precise, and they’ve taken what feels like an eternity to be that.

“I’m giving you memories even you can’t remove,” Alhammarret had said. “I should not have waited this long to do so.” 

Back in the present, Alhammarret finishes what Jace prays is the last line and sets his fingers on either side of an incision to hold it tense. Jace fails to entirely bite back a whimper.

“Patience, boy,” Alhammarret says.

Jace whispers, “It _hurts_.” 

“It is supposed to hurt. This is for remembering, if you ever tear out enough of your brain that you forget.”

There are cultures that induce scarification by making angular cuts in skin and packing them full of a granular foreign material. The body forces most of it out during the healing process, leaving thick, raised tissue behind. Asian people are more likely to form hypertrophic and keloid scars, the specific kind in question; instead of knitting the edges of skin together, they’re split by newer, harder scars. Jace looked it up.

He doesn’t know what the powder Alhammarret is using is, or why it flares with light when he speaks. Jace is a real-life telepath; the line between superpower and magic is dim. He made a mistake; he’ll accept the consequences; that’s what matters here. It can’t happen again, and Jace can’t be trusted to ensure that on his own.

It stings, more than stings, when Alhammarret starts forcing powder into the knife wounds. He seems careful on Jace’s chin and throat, where the bends are complex and the skin is thin, but Jace’s body still screams with pain and panic at the intrusion of foreign matter.

“Your name is Jace Beleren,” he intones. “Your mother and father loved you, and raised you until they knew they couldn’t any longer.” When Alhammarret hits cuts in skin over bone he pushes harder, grinding the powder into the wound, and Jace screams. “You are a great power, for you can destroy minds. But you are _not_ a conqueror, not a ruler, not _careless_.” 

Alhammarret rests his hands, grimy with powder and tacky with blood, lower on Jace’s abdomen, on his ribs. Lightly, now, without new pain. He whispers, “Remember.” 

Jace feels a rush of heat across the lines that Alhammarret’s carved in him, like each incision happening again, at once, on fire. He chances a look down at his chest—flares of agony on his chin and neck—and forces himself to swallow. He knows it looks worse than it is, but that’s a lot of blood. Part of his brain insists that he’s dying. 

Could be worse, Jace thinks.

Aware he’s being petulant, Jace says, “I can’t even remember my parents’ _faces_.” 

“That I cannot give you,” Alhammarret says. “Now. Do not allow the cuts to get infected.”

Jace nods sickly and tries reaching out with his mind again, looking for the stable conversational link he’s used to maintaining with the man, aiming for comfort from familiarity if nothing else; maybe even some conscious gesture from Alhammarret, if he’s lucky. But the pain at the front of his head spikes like an icepick through his temple and he collapses back on his bed. 

Alhammarret pauses on his way out like he felt that attempt. _Rest,_ he says firmly. _Pushing yourself after injury as some misbegotten punishment is deeply unwise._

Jace nods again. It makes the lines down his throat hurt.

_I’m going to clean up; I’ll return soon to clean the cuts again and dress them properly,_ Alhammarret adds, _and they should be healed enough that I can teach you how to use them before the end of the week._ But blood on the bedsheets or not, Jace is already asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> >   
> _I once stepped on a dying bird_  
>  _It was a mercy killing_  
>  _I couldn’t sleep for a week_  
>  _I kept feeling its breaking bones, I heard_  
>  _That if you see a star at night_  
>  _And if conditions are just right_  
>  _And you are standing on a cliff_  
>  _Then you can close your eyes_  
>  _And make a wish and take a step_  
>  _And change somebody’s life_  
>     
> —“The Killing Type”, Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra


End file.
